And from time to time I take used rolls of toilet paper from restaurants. Not time to time so much as all the time. The rolls have to be opened, untucked from the glue, with at least a quarter left. I blame-thank my mother. Growing up, she pissed and shat with the bathroom door open and the lights off to save on electricity. And if you think about it, memory is also a finite resource. But more importantly it is also a site of vitality. Memory has agency. And I think about that. Agency. I think about it the whole time that I’m in the bathroom of this Lower East Side restaurant. 

When I return to a table of old friends—mid-thirties friends—and to a plate of fleshy, pink salmon and a 1986 Sauv Blanc, in honor of the year we were all born, I’m most annoyed that memory didn’t tap me on my shoulder and remind me to bring my big purse with me into the restaurant bathroom. And while I’m annoyed, I think, perhaps, my memory is embarrassed. 

At a nightclub last week, I was with the mid-thirties, the ones who still go out because they aren’t yet using his and hers or his and his towel sets. After being felt up and also feeling up under skirts and the ribbing of a semi-hard dick, I used my forearm to sweep a number of rolls into my big purse. It was last-call, and the stalls were empty. Nightclubs or after-hours spots are the best; the cleaning staff leave reams of toilet paper for self-service. No one is there to sniff you out and count the rolls after you exit and then threaten to call security because you couldn’t possibly have used that many. I serve myself, especially when I’ve been overserved, in the passive voice.

My mother would like for me to get knocked up. At my age, thirty-five, she explains it would be a choice to have a little me. She doesn’t like the term ‘knocked up’ but she does hope for it. When I meet her at the elementary school where she works as a nurse, she offers up all the fathers picking up their kids. I’m sure that they’re not all single dads. Some are more involved in their kids’ education than others, some have good jobs, some are living off alimony, some have drinking problems, but none are too good for me at my age with my old ovaries. 

I picture my ovaries balding with grey beards. 

I don’t think about that at our table. Instead, I explain the difference between my being alone and being lonely to the mid-thirties. I am alone and in love with my alone time, I say to them. I stretch out diagonally across my king-sized bed and luxuriate in reporting to myself and only myself. I perform this as a dramatic speech. They laugh, and I try not to claw out my eyes at the thought of my fucking empty apartment and the sound of my voice regurgitating against itself, only itself. I drink two-thirds of our second 1986, in honor of our birth year, Sauv Blanc bottle that the sommelier described as, “a largely good year that stopped short of excellent.” I excuse myself again. This time I bring my big purse and check multiple stalls.

My best friend, a mid-thirty, who was at dinner but not at the night club because she is accomplished as a mother, has a neighbor who is a collector. She collects small figurines, newspapers, slippers without a match, dustpans with no broom or sweeper. She collects bottles, glass bottles of all shapes and sizes and plastic fast-food cups. She has many from the supersize days. They are stacked. 

Best Friend hates her neighbor because her collecting bring tenants that crawl. These tenants don’t bother her neighbor. I mention that collecting might be an addiction. Something is released in her neighbor’s brain—dopamine, synapse spark, a feel-good feeling when she collects another bathmat and stacks it atop the waist high stack of bathmats next to the stack of Mad Magazines. I start to thumb through a copy. We are in Best Friend’s neighbor’s apartment the morning after the mid-thirties dinner because seeing this shit is believing, Best Friend says. Neighbor is out and about. Best Friend has a key. There was a time when they had been neighborly. 

Because it’s my job, Best Friend asks what insurance covers. Deterioration from too much shit? Bugs from too much shit? It depends—but that’s not my specialty. I’m in excess casualty loss—sudden, unexpected, or unusual events such as a flood, hurricane, tornado, fire, earthquake, or volcanic eruption. 

Excess casualty doesn’t include normal wear and tear.

Best Friend is trying to subtly convince me of something with this overt display. They don’t even make Mad Magazine anymore, Best Friend says. I want to mention the toilet paper I still have in my big purse.

But I don’t. I say instead that everyone has quirks. My mother found many ways to save. When cooking rice, she would stretch out the butter wrapping over the water so that all the butter steamed off the paper. And she would only turn on lights when she needed to. Best Friend had heard about my mother’s blind bathroom use before—and saw it once when she had come over to work on a group-project about refugees because we had an influx in seventh grade after the fall of Haiti’s Duvalier regime. So, she says. But did your mother do the yellow-let-it-mellow, brown-flush-it-down to save water? No, I say. That’s gross. I turn my head away as if I can smell the piss mellowing. See, she says, quirks can be gross.

I wonder about that. I hadn’t bought new toilet paper since I turned thirty and adulthood became expected of me. Depending on the venue, sometimes the toilet paper is two-ply, sometimes one. When I went to the nightclub, I was so deep in my euphoria, the feeling of getting away with it and five vodka sodas in, that I didn’t check the ply of my haul.

In the evening, after the anti-neighbor, Mad Magazine morning, I go on a date with a delicious entrepreneur because I don’t know how many more dramatic monologues on loneliness I have left in me. My date created a razor for Black men that makes it so the blade will not pull the hair up from the root and cut the hair under the skin during a shave. When the hair grows back it won’t curl into the follicle under the skin and cause ingrown hairs. I read this at my kitchen table, sipping my anti-anxiety first date Pinot Noir medication while my make-up settles, and a fan blows on my face to prevent my edges from going back. I’ve blown my afro out, so it has a little bounce to it. I get so into my date’s website and background on his abandoned Facebook page that I am running late. I hate being late.

I hate when anything is late, especially my period.

On the date, I think about my old ovaries tending to lateness and order the Cornish hen with a red wine reduction and new potatoes. In my lateness, my date took the liberty of ordering a bottle of red and a cheese plate. A plate of cheese. The table is set with red and white wine glasses, a paring knife, and on either side of the setting of dishes stacked per course is a fleet of knives and forks. The spread of cutlery looks like that God awful, stick-figure family sticker on mini-vans that lets everyone know that there is a fleet of children in a two-parent home and sometimes a Fido. 

After the soup, a lobster bisque, and an amuse-bouche, not in that order, I excuse myself.

In the bathroom, the napkins are plush. There are individual rooms for each stall, with individual lighting. I memorize where things are and close the door locking out the world. A la Mama, I piss in the dark squaring my ass over but not touching the most pristine toilet I’ve seen in a long time. Mid-piss I decide that Delicious is doing well for himself and that this restaurant with its sous vide Cornish hens means he is either trying to wife me or wants to take my panties off tonight. 

I call Best Friend for the go-ahead, because I want Delicious to take my panties off tonight. But men are so sensitive about the chase and what it means if I give it up, as if it is something I want to keep all the time. I don’t know anyone interested in hoarding the puss all the damn time. But here we all are trying to fall in love and build legacies and get on the BlackLove Instagram page with an engagement story and then push a minivan with the family fleet of stickers. But on my SUV, the woman will be full-figured with an afro, if I can find a Black version. 

In the individual toilet room, Best Friend tells me to keep my panties on. She’s on my mother’s side. Or is she? Mother’s goal at this point is getting me knocked up. I imagine even after a first date will do.

At the table, Delicious asks about my favorite childhood memory. The question stirs warm in my soup belly. He fills my glass and smiles. His beard is immaculate—maybe too clean, but I imagine it scraping the inside of my thigh and I take a lush swallow of wine. I tell him about the time my dad took me and Best Friend shopping for dresses for the fifth-grade father-daughter dance and then danced with both of us in a ring-around-the-rosy style because her father drank a lot. I don’t mention that my father was polite enough to drink when he thought I was asleep and impolite enough to then get into screaming matches with my mother over what married people scream about: money. For them it was enough money to avoid disappearing into pre-cut out shapes of the other person’s life. 

Delicious is excited about being a father one day. He leans in when he says this, and then puts up a finger as if to pause some excitement he assumes I have because he is excited about what he thinks women want. I just want a nice two-ply though. But he’s fine, and smart and fills my glass again. It’s chivalrous. 

I ask him to tell me about the wildest night in his twenties when everyone drank and danced at clubs and had entry-level jobs and the world or grad school ahead of them. His story is non-distinct—he and his boys, drunk on the Two train headed uptown because there were no cabs. Well, there were cabs just not for them. It suits him in a way, the non-distinct story. I tell him about the club and how I felt up men and women and how I borrowed a couple rolls of toilet paper. He laughs heartily and shakes his head, twenties man, he says. Good times, he says. I’m glad they’re over, he says. 

Best Friend says that too, the over part. She has two boys who crawl and walk now. The youngest’s cry is a deep rumble. I held him to my shoulder, cradling his head when he was born. He didn’t like it and registered his dislike immediately. His whole body vibrated. I swayed with him, which only caused him to shake. He opened his mouth, at my ear, and let out a grown man’s howl. His older brother looked as startled as I did. I call him Thunder. They are rough and tumble boys who need a backyard now, Best Friend says. I love the boys. And I hate backyards. I hate suburbia and all its separate but together trappings: double sinks, two car garages, two point five kids, two point five divorces. 

Best Friend hates her one-point-five-bedroom apartment in a big complex that used to be a housing project in Fort Greene before it was lightly gentrified. Her neighbor’s collections breed things that crawl. A few crawled into her boys’ bed and bit the youngest—three small bites in a row. She shows me his chubby toddler leg and says see, as if she had to prove to me that quirks can be gross and dangerous. Bed bugs are impossible.

What if it’s me and her and the boys? 

We—she and I—can afford a backyard. Even with child support she can’t afford one alone. We had spoken about that arrangement before, jokingly. I think of her subtle, overt Mad Magazine, seeing is believing display at work the next day. I start to look for homes for rent with two car garages. But I can’t concentrate much because it’s that late afternoon time, and I had lunch with a client, and Delicious has asked me out again.

Lunch was one of those affairs that I will talk about with the mid-thirties who all have work horror shows. The client ordered a round of shots at lunch. At 12:16 in the afternoon my boss took his shot like a champ and then so did I. The thing about excess casualty insurance is that I sell a product companies hope to never have to use. Primary insurance covers expected losses. Excess covers the unforeseen, catastrophic losses.

So, we—boss and I—built a false and fast camaraderie with the client in order to sell. We drank and revealed ourselves. When the client asked me about my dating life, I told him a story about someone I knew once who went on a Tinder first date with a guy she had been chatting with for two weeks. She thought maybe he was the one, even if his beard was too perfectly manicured. On the way out of the fancy restaurant, after he’s warmed her heart by asking about her childhood, her big purse slips off her shoulder because it’s bulky. And also, probably because she was wavy from the dinner wine and the heavy pour of her pre–first date, anti-anxiety medication. (I’m too polite to mention the And also, probably because.) She bent to pick up her purse that was splayed open exposing many rolls of used toilet paper. She saw her date taking notice of what was in her purse, but neither spoke of it. She ordered a car home, and he kissed her on the cheek to say goodnight. 

Client was all in and asked, what happened next? Well, he texted her the next day and asked her out again. But the problem is, I leaned in, and I said this slowly because my words were loose after a second shot: Should she date someone who is okay with knowing that his date takes used rolls of toilet paper from restaurants? 

Everyone laughed, and I worried about the bites on the baby who is crawling now. 

The answer is yes, she should. I do. I text Delicious back because my loneliness is this thing I keep like a keepsake. It’s palpable. I feel its fullness, the texture of it, of loneliness, the more of it I have.  

And I have plenty. So much, the rolls fill my home office from floor to ceiling.  After work, I add the rolls from the client lunch and rub the open flaps between my thumb and pointer. Two-ply. It settles me until I think of Best Friend’s neighbor, the collector. I hug her in my mind. I pull her into my bosom and smell her silver afro. It smells like my shea moisture leave-in conditioner, and we spend time together sipping from the supersized cups. We inhabit each other’s loneliness. She lost her family during the Duvalier regime. She is a refugee, and she keeps things. It started with keepsakes. Then it turned into feeding memory’s hunger. We hold hands, fingers intertwined. Her nail beds are mine. It’s complex. I think. And I worry.

I worry about Thunder’s bites. Best Friend thinks I’ll be a good mother. But all I know, or have evidenced, of motherhood—the best of mothering—is when I got to be too much, too steeped in my childhood narcissism, too much to discipline or cook for or clean up after or be an emotional wet blanket for—the best I saw, was of my mother in the dark on the toilet with herself, only herself, until she disappeared. I loved her the most then, when she appeared only to herself.

I do that sometimes. Appear only to myself, for days. Best Friend hates it but understands and thinks it will happen less when we’re living together.  We talked or I started, and she mostly talked about how we could make living together work. 

Delicious doesn’t have to understand that about me yet, appearing only to myself, that is. I’m still figuring out if I want to keep him. But I know I want to go through the process of figuring out whether I’ll keep Delicious when I spend the night at his house. Sometimes, we, the mid-thirties, don’t even want to figure that out.

But I did. Three dates in, we exchanged bodily fluids and orgasms—the orgasm, fleeting as it were, was not the thing. It was after I opened his closet to look at his shoes. Since the second date, memory had been whispering to me that my dad always had well-worn leather shoes. After he packed his things and moved into a small ranch house with no basement or garage in Flushing, my mother left the space his shoes occupied empty, his whole side of the closet empty, for years. Even now I picture my dad’s leather lace-up shoes wrapped around his feet with familiarity—a quality shoe he would take to his cobbler to get shined and the heels replaced, and taps nailed onto the corners. I scanned Delicious’ shoes. There were no taps, no well-worn gentleman’s shoes that had memorized his gait. 

But there were numbered cardboard boxes the size of shoe boxes. He was in the kitchen making eggless egg whites. I pulled out the top box and it had razors—a box of plastic razors. I grabbed a pink one. It was used. Bits of hair and Dove soap were caked below the blades. It’s mine, I thought then. I knew it was mine the way you know a non-distinct object among other non-distinct objects belongs to you. He took my razor. I pulled out a green one, it smelled like shaving cream. Gross. I dropped it. He came into the bedroom. He stood behind me. I turned. You take people’s razors—used razors. You took mine, I said, raising my voice in accusation. He didn’t respond. He pressed his lips together and raised his eyebrows toward me, at me, until it dawned on me. He didn’t say it, just stood there knowing he won this one. Touché.  I nodded and I lowered my shoulders and my voice. 

What a fucking weirdo.

This is the moment we decide we’re both all in. I couldn’t identify it at the time. But I know it in the retelling of it to Best Friend. I leave out his knowing look back at me because—toilet paper. But she doesn’t notice the hole in the story because she is distracted. She shifts her legs and her eyes when she’s nervous. We are on our way to look at the two houses we’re deciding between. I don’t know if she thinks I will leave her like her fiancé did, with two kids, because he wasn’t ready to be a family man in his early forties. The embarrassment back splash off his bullshit got on my good coat when she told me. It was too late to not be ready, the kids are here. I haven’t worn that coat since. And I’m not sure my getting closer with Delicious, who takes used razors for research, is the reason for her nervousness, but it doesn’t matter. I reassure her that I’m all in and she returns to me.

I don’t tell her much more about Delicious. I leave things out like Delicious doesn’t eat pork or any meat, but he especially hates pork. He’d been to his uncle’s pig farm—pigs are loveable and disgusting. He says, with the same warning finger, that “lips that touch swine won’t touch mine.” I curse in my head. K, I say out loud. Not okay, just a childish K, like if I give the least in response to him annoying me with his rules then I’ll get some power back. It doesn’t work on text, and I find out then that it doesn’t work in real life. I take to making bacon for myself every morning. And on nights when we have dates, I pull my pointer through the congealed bacon grease and apply it to my lips. I giggle when we kiss.

Soon we begin to do all the motions of love, of being close to being in it. We don’t say it. Instead, we exchange vulnerabilities after orgasms. The underbelly of my dad at the father-daughter dance is knowing even then that my parents’ marriage was broken—irreparable like my pierced tongue after I’d taken out the rebellion ring I flashed at my mother after their divorce. The fat in the underbelly was the way they looked through each other, not misunderstanding each other, more so looking through the person as if they were glass. Delicious tells me that it wasn’t his boys on the Two train uptown after the club. It was his girlfriend at the time, and he felt exposed with her on the subway, not a single cab would stop for him—each available light mocking his extended, brown hand. He couldn’t protect her, like men are supposed to, he said. He’s still embarrassed and sometimes wonders if he will ever be able to be, to a partner or to a family, what the world will require of him. 

After hard stories and our vulnerabilities finding comfort in warm spaces between our bellies and the still liquid crux and corners of our pressed-up bodies, he asks about my moving in with Best Friend. It stills the air. No, we don’t have those feelings between us, she’s straight and not my type, I say to his pointed questions. He feels good about that, I can tell. But we are still in that mid-early relationship limbo. Will either of us stay? 

I lean away. 

They talk about intent versus impact during diversity talks at work the next Monday, and I think of Delicious and unanswered questions. I intend to push him away because who dates someone who fills her purse with used rolls of toilet paper? And why would I owe such a person an explanation for why I’m moving in with my best friend? Eventually he asks why my lips smell like meat. And he asks whether we will have privacy when he comes over to the new house. I imagine him picturing our time together after work: sipping cocktails replaced with homework, bathing Thunder, and making macaroni and cheese dinners with Best Friend. 

I don’t enjoy rules, I say. I don’t enjoy restrictions. 

I tell him about the bacon grease chapstick. He breathes deeply and scratches his beard. He drops my hand which he has taken to holding when he meets me by Water Street near my job where we take long, cold walks by the water. He walks ahead of me. I see his back and the heels of his shoes. Each heel has fresh from the cobbler taps. He listened. I sad-smile. This is his exit. Toilet paper thieving okay, but unconventional living with Best Friend is a deal breaker. The impact of my intent. It will be me and Best Friend and the boys, I conclude. I watch his back get smaller. I wasn’t the marrying type anyway. 

He stops and bends a bit at the waist, his shoulders are shaking. When I catch up to him there are tears in his eyes. He stands upright and his laugh is large and round like he has a barrel in his chest. He grabs hold of my hand. He is still laughing. I look at our gloved palms touching. I mean, am I weird or is this person who wants me anyway weird?

Bacon grease chapstick is funny.

Our—me and Best Friend’s—living situation is not. 

We—me and Delicious—don’t talk about it further. 

In a week, a week of not talking about it, I use a quarter and a payphone to call him. He comes. Growing up my mother said never to call her in such a situation—call your father. But Dad passed years after their divorce. My old therapist said his passing during my formative years means my memory of him is frozen. I fire her, because his memory walks around and taps me on the shoulder all the time. 

And no one tells you that when you’re arrested you quickly learn to walk again because your arms are restricted, and if you’ve always had arms, you need them free for balance. 

Delicious and I don’t speak for several lights as we leave the station. When we do speak, he says he will have to examine my body for any police brutality. It is an off-hand, not well-crafted attempt at lightening the situation. I speak when he speaks and say, you know Baldwin was arrested in Paris for taking a used hotel bed sheet. We exchange incredulous smirks at our strange attempts, him at humor, me at absolution. 

As we drive east toward the FDR, I don’t tell Delicious that this isn’t my first arrest. Best Friend and I were arrested for riding the bus while Black in high school. We fit a description. For years, before Blackgirltherapy became a hashtag, we had only spoken to each other about the weight of handcuffs and the guilt of our flesh, our skin. It brought us closer—a fusion. But I don’t mention it, or us. I don’t tell him about me and Best Friend leaning against each other so that we could know that the other existed in that moment. I don’t tell him that I stopped talking to the girl who was the new kid in seventh grade. She was a refugee, and more immigrant than us, who also got arrested for being Black on the bus in high school that day. And while memory tapped me on the shoulder it kicked her in the teeth. So I stopped talking to her because she slit her wrists long way and laid down to sleep when she got home from the precinct. When she returned to school she smelled to me like the inside of our cell, like metal and trauma. The memory of the smell felt on my tongue like the iron thick of her blood seeping into her pillowcase. When she returned to school bandaged, I couldn’t talk to her without swallowing the fear of confinement. Best Friend knew this of me and loved me anyway. I don’t tell him that. Any of it. Instead, I say, as we take the FDR south to the Brooklyn Bridge, that it was a fancy cell on the upper East Side. I was well taken care of. I say, it’s probably the cell where they hold pretty kleptomaniacs who steal Van Gogh key chains from the Met’s gift shop. He doesn’t ask and I don’t say where I was when I was caught taking rolls of toilet paper from the bathroom. He doesn’t ask and I don’t tell him that I was at Home Goods getting goods for our—me and Best Friend’s—new home.

The Monday after Delicious examines my body for brutality, Client is back for excess casualty insurance coverage for his property’s sister golf courses. Greens upon greens, we’re at Smith and Wollensky. I order a salad. I’m trying to compromise with the no meat eating boyfriend—never to his face though. Client wants to know if there is any update with my friend’s love life. Well, she’s cured of her TP borrowing, I say. Why? He asks, disappointed. Well, she was caught, and arrested for stuffing twenty rolls into her big purse. No way, he says. He leans in, so is that like a misdemeanor? A felony? A perverse hope coats all three syllables of the word ‘felony’. I lean in. From what I understand there were no charges, just an adjournment for a year with the caveat that she stays out of trouble. I mean it’s toilet paper, I say and pantomime the incredulous palms up. He laughs. But that is a cost for the business owner, he says. I nod. She’s probably never looked at it that way. A felon, is she hot? Client asks. He raises his eyebrows up and down. I don’t respond. Come on, he says. Just one night, she won’t be lonely anymore and I might stop her from relapsing, he says, full of himself and his cleverness. I laugh, boss laughs. She’s not your type, I say and remember that the old boys’ network was once all boys. 

The boys are excited about moving. They will miss the neighbor who gave them unsolicited and undesired hugs and loose candy that Best Friend would not allow them to eat. Best Friend slides a pamphlet for bedbug servicing under Neighbor’s door. I tell her that’s passive aggressive. She calls me a convict. Touché, I say. 

I picture Neighbor’s bowlegged wobble from side to side as she walks into her apartment—her arms heavy with a recent haul from GoodWill. I picture her stepping over the bedbug pamphlet and pressing her ear against the wall she shared with Best Friend and our babies. The wall is cold and flat and silent. It wasn’t, before I decided to help. I stole her company, her sounds, her thunder. I picture her finding more and more to fill her apartment—wobbly stacks reach near the ceiling. A tea kettle atop a cake topping, atop a box of Christmas ornaments atop a glass menagerie, atop seven monopoly board games, all atop men’s size thirteen shoe boxes filled with stones and sand for a sturdy base. This is all leaning against a similar stack of random collectables that is leaning tenuously against a wall. She tries again to hear the boys. She sits cross-legged, and she leans her ear against the cold wall. Nothing. She presses a fuzzy candy into the center of her tongue. Stretching her legs, she pokes at a stack. It tumbles down onto her.

We sit down to talk in a triad shape. Me, Best Friend, and Delicious are in my apartment surrounded by mostly filled U-Haul boxes. Best Friend taps her foot, and Delicious smiles showing no teeth. I start. I raise my hand and say, my name is Rumi, I’m a mid-thirty and I steal used rolls of toilet paper. Neither smiles. Best Friend says, people have actual addictions, you shouldn’t parrot AA. Delicious adds, taking stuff you can afford to buy doesn’t mean you’re an addict—worse, it means you’re cheap. 

I smile inwardly, the joke failed, but them ganging up against me means they’re on the same side. Maybe this three-way friendship, romance, living situation will work. 

Delicious says, let’s get to the point of this meeting: is there a projected timeline or close out? Or will we all live together until the last kid leaves for college? His sarcasm has a hard edge of not sarcasm. Maybe it won’t work.

Who is ‘we all’? Best Friend directs at Delicious and looks at me. 

Whatever, you know what I mean: y’all living together, Delicious says pointing at me and Best Friend with his pointer and pinky. And me when I visit Rumi, my lady, he ends. 

Delicious grabs my knee at ‘my lady.’ I tingle. 

Clearly, if you two plan to get married and have children then we can adjust then, Best Friend says. Her ‘thens’ are future oriented.

Delicious: what if we decide to move in together in a few weeks with no marriage plan for kids? 

Best Friend: so y’all are gonna shack up? 

Shack up? Delicious flinches as if hit. We’re adults, he says. And I didn’t know I was dating Rumi and friends and family. 

They both turn to look at me. 

I look between a gap of stacked boxes and out the window. I think about the neighbor who has no one. And no one to offer loose, fuzzy candies to any longer. 

Listen, I say. They both look to me for a decision. But I don’t have anything. 

Let’s just see how it goes. 

Moving is a grand distraction from seeing—there is just movement. I’m not sure that it’s forward. And I feel Delicious’ exhaustion. The sheer size of it—the move, the babies, mostly the babies, they box him out. I know it when I mention them, and he reminds me that they’re not babies anymore. They need me, I say, incredulous. You need you, he replies. I can’t unravel that, so I leave it there and we go to a big box store.

Ahead of me the boys run past the neon-colored sugar and pick up a big bag of unwrapped, murky-colored sucking candy. Best Friend run-walks after them, she looks back at me, I shrug. Let them have it, it could be worse, I say, they could want supersized meals. She laughs. 

I look over my shoulder and I can barely see Delicious’ head over the stacks of Charmin two-ply I put in the cart on top of a case of Sauv Blanc. I’m not sure how he can manage the cart without being able to see a way forward.

And I know in my gut that my non-decision during the triad is a decision I didn’t say out loud. 

Coward.

I continue my cowardice and try to ride back to the new house with Best Friend. Delicious stands by his car. My Sauv Blanc case and the toilet paper are still in the cart. I reach for Thunder’s hand to walk with them, but Thunder pulls away. I walk toward Delicious. When he sees Thunder pull away, and my turning toward him, he pulls my items into his car. Delicious faces me and I face forward. Night has descended, I hide in its dark. He drives off and then begins to list:

Toilet paper thieving on our first date.

You drink a lot, he says as he hooks his thumb toward my Sauv Blanc on the back seat.

You made bacon grease chapstick and smeared it on before our dates—when you know I don’t eat meat.

With each one of my follies, he bangs the side of his hand against the steering wheel for emphasis. 

You get arrested for stealing toilet paper. And I pick you up. I don’t even say anything. And don’t give me that bullshit about Baldwin. I read Notes of a Native Son too—he didn’t know the bedsheet was stolen. But you, you know what you’re doing. 

And you’re moving in with a pre-made family—there’s no room for me. You don’t make room for me.

Now he is yelling. He is losing himself. I find comfort there. 

So many flipping things and I still wanted you, he says. His eyes search the night ahead of us.

Wanted? I think and nestle up against the past tense, smug for knowing all along.

And she’s Trini and you’re Jamaican, he says. And what about me?

What about you? I say.

I’m from Bensonhurst, not even Flatbush—your Caribbean duo shit is another thing I’m outside of. 

Strange logic to prove a point, I’m familiar.

And what if the boys’ father comes back? He says. 

Please, I say. He’s Black history. He won’t. 

Pausing between each word, Delicious says, what if he does? 

I don’t respond.

I show up, he continues. He uses the steering wheel again for emphasis. That’s what you said you wanted—someone who shows up. I show up, every time. We could be, he nods, we could be everything. 

I breathe out. 

Could we? I say and turn to look at the side of his face. Lonely won’t leave me alone. Lonely hasn’t left me alone since my parents’ divorce. Adults leave. That’s what we do. I emphasize every syllable.

Quiet settles around us, encasing us tighter within the car windows and doors.  We both turn to look forward. Our eyes settle on the road leading to a home.

We—me and Best Friend—stand in the foyer of our two-story, brick colonial in Canarsie—a Brooklyn urban, suburb compromise replete with a front and back yard and bushes that will need upkeep and a driveway that separates us from neighbors. After unloading, Delicious returns to his car. He needs something outside. 

We dance ring-around-the-rosy style, me, Best Friend and our oldest boy. Through the bay window I see Delicious see me, see us. Thunder cries, he feels left out. I look away from Delicious and bend to pick him up. He crawls out of my reach. I go after him. 

When I come back up, I see Delicious’ brake lights. I hug the baby to my chest. I’m not sure what I’ll tell my mother about this. Thunder’s small fists beat against my shoulder and neck, he cries out for release. He twists out of my embrace and wrangles down to my waist. I try to hold him until I can’t. His tiny fists beat for release. I bend to put him down. He puts his fist in his mouth and looks up at me crawling back. He circles his fat, baby arm around my leg.